The Wilderness

where our belovedness is tested by life's losses

Mark 1:12-13

12 The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13 And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him.

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In one moment, Jesus is baptized and given a deep awareness of his belovedness to God. In the very next moment, Jesus is driven out into the wilderness. Jesus is plunged into the Spirit of love, and then immediately plunged into a dark night of the soul. In fact, it is the Spirit herself that “drove him out” into the wilderness. Are you surprised by this? You shouldn't be. An encounter with Spirit– with love– will drive us deeply into connection with God and others, but just as often, it will drive us into desolate places. 

Christ in the Wilderness by Briton Riviere

If you have deconstructed your faith, then you may know what it feels like to be led by Spirit into the wilderness. In order to love and include people like Jesus, many of us left exclusionary church communities. Some of us were rejected by conservative friends and family who didn’t appreciate our spiritual evolution. Many of us don’t quite know what a spiritual home looks like anymore. The wilderness is where we bring our heartaches.

This is a familiar, mythical pattern across cultures and spiritual traditions– an authentic initiation into the world of Spirit almost always leads into the wilderness. Jesus’s forty days in the wilderness metaphorically mirrors the forty years Israel spent in the wilderness on their way to the promised land. Every quest for authenticity with self and God goes through desert places– if this is where you find yourself now, you are in good spiritual company.

Over the past four years, I have had many things ripped away from me: My church community. My position within evangelicalism. A particular form of Christian faith that relied on comfortable, dogmatic certainty. My marriage. Every loss was painful, but that last one in particular tore me to shreds. The losses stripped me bare, but also taught me things about myself I wouldn’t have learned any other way. Richard Rohr says that after the age of 30, success has nothing more to teach us. It feels nice, but it doesn’t unlock new levels of growth. By the second half of life, all of our growth will come from “failure, humiliation, and suffering; things falling apart. Dissolution is the only thing that allows the soul to go to a deeper place.” 

Of course, the wilderness doesn’t automatically make you better. Sometimes people get worse! Through my divorce, I believe I have become more soft-hearted, accepting, self-aware, less entitled, and less attached to uncontrollable outcomes. But some people double-down in bitterness through divorce. I know men who rage at their ex-wives, rehearsing a story like, “she was wrong to leave me, I didn’t deserve that!” They don’t grow from the experience– their sense of entitlement only deepens. In the wilderness, we discover what stories we are telling ourselves, and these stories that govern our life are put to the test. If we keep rehearsing stories of scarcity and alienation, our souls will continue to shrink. But if we are self-reflective in the wilderness, it is an opportunity to discard the stories that are trapping us, and cling to the truths that lead us into love.

What stories are you believing, even now, through life’s losses? You may need to pull away from the hustle to even hear the sound of your own soul. Self-reflection is difficult in our capitalist rat-race. In the wilderness, Jesus sought stillness and solitude. 

Conservative Christians tend to react negatively to practices of meditation or mindfulness, but Jesus' prayer life in the wilderness had much more in common with these contemplative traditions than the prayers many of us heard in Sunday School! I grew up praying wordy prayers, weighted with my wants and needs. Jesus sought to contemplatively enter the presence of God. If you have been told that meditation or contemplative silence is at odds with Christianity, then you have been robbed of the spiritual practices of Jesus! 

When Matthew and Luke tell this story, Jesus experiences a mystical dialogue with the devil– literally “the slanderer.”  It’s not important whether the devil is a real guy or not. This is an experience Jesus has in his consciousness– I see it as an internal battle for the heart of Jesus’s spirituality. The slanderer starts each of his temptations by saying, “IF you are the son of God…”¹ The ultimate temptation is to believe that our belovedness in God is bullshit. Jesus overcame the tempter by reminding himself that he had no need to “prove” God. Spirituality isn’t about proof, it’s about love. Jesus reminded himself of the safety of God’s love, and he emerged from the wilderness more deeply connected to himself and to God.

Jesus Tempted in the Wilderness by James Tissot

It is one thing to hear the words “you are my beloved child, and I delight in you,” as Jesus heard in his baptism. But in the wilderness we discover what words live in our soul. When the shit hits the fan, do I abandon my belief in my belovedness before God– in everyone’s belovedness before God? The wilderness puts our beliefs to the test. If you find yourself there, take the time to slow down, and listen. In our hurry we are often skimming over the surface of the depths of our own lives, and in the depths over which we are skimming is our belovedness in God.² We must enter these depths.

May we have the courage to sit with our losses, so that we get a glimpse of our true hearts. 

May we boldly examine the stories we tell ourselves, and let go of the stories that are not serving us or leading us into love.

May we emerge from the wilderness with an abiding belief in our belovedness, that we might extend true love to others.

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Inhale: Breathing in, I embrace the stillness. (4 seconds)

-HOLD- (4 seconds)

Exhale: Breathing out, I know I am not alone.(4 seconds)

Inhale: Breathing in, I am listening to Spirit. (4 seconds)

-HOLD- (4 seconds)

Exhale: Breathing out, I rehearse the truth of my belovedness. (4 seconds)

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1. Matthew 4:3, 4:6.

2. Paraphrase of James Finley as heard on his wonderful podcast, Turning to the Mystics.